The future of home entertainment will be characterised by two important developments. The first development is that an increasing amount of metadata items will be available. The metadata items will contain all kind of additional data related to multimedia objects, recording media and consumer electronic devices. The second development is that consumer electronic devices will increasingly be connected to networks allowing for communication and data exchange between the devices.
When dealing with metadata items in an environment of removable recording media and consumer electronic devices connected to a network, an important aspect is how the metadata items shall propagate between the involved devices and/or recording media. Known metadata schemes make no assumptions about metadata propagation. Their approach with respect to propagation of metadata is completely static. Any propagation of metadata items must be explicitly initiated by the user. However, it would be very efficient and user friendly if certain metadata items could be automatically propagated in a controlled way. A straightforward solution for this purpose is not available, since a propagation behaviour appropriate for one kind of metadata item might be inappropriate for a different kind of metadata item.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to propose a method for enabling and controlling automatic propagation of metadata items to recording media and to devices for reading from and/or writing to recording media.